Melodic Variance in the Songs of Thibaut De Champagne

Melodic Variance in the Songs of Thibaut de Champagne Christopher Callahan and Daniel E. O’Sullivan Abstract: Editing monophonic songs of Old French poets from roughly the second half of the twelfth to the early fourteenth centuries, poses several challenges, not least of which requires addressing variance on the level of both text and melody. Thibaut IV, king of Navarre, left his public over sixty songs characterized by generic breadth, registral subtlety, and varying melodic range. While providing reliable versions for study and performance, editors still need to help readers glimpse musical alternatives and variants in meaningful ways; otherwise, they run the risk of diminishing readers’ understanding of the trouvère tra- dition. In this article, the authors examine micro-variation in concordant melodies as well as how information on non-concordant, unica melodies and rhythmic interpretations in later manuscripts fleshes out a musical aesthetic that appears, but is not, simple and straightfor- ward. Keywords: Philology, Scholarly editing, Music editing, Mediae- val manuscripts, French literature. Scholars of Old French have long resisted the overly positivistic editorial policies associated with the nineteenth-century classical philologist Karl Lachmann, who sought to reveal an original text from extant, imperfect copies, scrubbed clean of scribal errors and contamination. Philologists subsequently turned to Joseph Bédier’s “best-text” approach as the most intellectually defensible policy: editors edit one witness for clarity and note all variants, regardless of their relative merit, in the apparatus. A few decades after Bédier’s passing, textual variants worked their way back to respectability as Paul Zumthor elucidated the fundamental notion of mouvance in Mediaeval textuality (1979, 610). Mediaeval texts are based, para- doxically, on instability.1 Manuscript witnesses preserve mere traces of ephemeral experience of Mediaeval texts that were read or performed aloud, heard by a public, transformed by subsequent performers, written down by someone, copied then by someone 1 The rise of genetic criticism in the years after the wane of positivism has perhaps facilitated its focus on process and evolution and freed it from the methodological baggage that Mediaeval textual criticism continues to carry. 11 12 VARIANTS 12/13 (2016) else, etc.2 As texts were constantly reworked, either consciously or otherwise through the stages of transmission, no single entity was responsible for what survives to this day. Editors must come to terms with this situation if they wish to convey the real conditions of the pre-print, oral culture that produced these works. Editing trouvère lyric, the monophonic songs of Old French poets from roughly the second half of the twelfth to the early fourteenth centuries, poses several challenges, not least of which requires addressing variance on the level of text and melody. Thibaut IV, count of Brie and Champagne and king of Navarre, left aficionados of Mediaeval song a particularly large (more than sixty songs) and rich corpus in terms of generic breadth, registral subtlety, and melodic range. The first complete edition of Thibaut’s songs, published by Axel Wallensköld (1925), remains the standard reference work on Thibaut.3 Wallensköld takes an editorial position midway between Lachmann and Bédier, creating an ideal reading based on “[le] choix de la meilleure des variantes parmi celles que la filiation des manuscrits permet d’accepter” (1925, xcviii) (“the choice of the best variants that the manuscript filiations allow”) rather than recovering an urtext. The latter task proved impossi- ble owing to the “contaminated” state of the manuscripts because “ils remontent directement ou indirectement à plusieurs sources 2 “Le texte est la ‘trace’ de l’œuvre: trace orale, fuyante, déformable. L’érudition accumulée depuis un siècle a presque constamment méconnu le seul point digne d’intérêt: le fait même de cette dérivation langagière dont on observe les effets chez nos vieux poètes, inventeurs, au sein de langues nouveau- nées, d’une ‘écriture’, qui pour cette même raison, ne pouvait rien devoir à des traditions antérieures, sinon de façon externe et anecdotique. ‘Écriture’ du reste convient mal puisqu’il s’est longtemps agi de chant seul” (Zumthor 1972, 95) (“The text is a ‘trace’ of the work, an oral, fugitive trace, which is easily deformed. The last century of accumulated erudition has almost invariably misunderstood the only point of real interest: the very fact of the text’s basis in spoken language. This linguistic source, whose effects are observable in the works of our earliest poets, who invented a ‘written language’ in the midst of the emerging vernaculars, cannot for that very reason owe anything to earlier traditions, except in an anecdotal way exterior to the texts themselves. ‘Written language’ is, in any case, an inappropriate term, since song unsupported by a text for reading was for long the only mode of existence for these works.”) 3 The earliest melodic edition devoted to Thibaut, H. Anglès’s Canciones del rey Teobaldo (1973), was compiled posthumously from the author’s note- books and is at best a work in progress. Callahan and O'Sullivan Melodic Variance in Thibaut 13 utilisées en même temps” (1925, xcviii) (“they derive directly or indi- rectly from several sources used simultaneously”). His published version may thus be found directly in one manuscript or combined from more than one source under the cover of a uniform orthogra- phy (usually taken from trouvère MS K―Paris, Arsenal 5196), or it might be a hypothetical emendation when all manuscript readings are deemed to be faulty. Despite the obvious methodological faults in Wallensköld’s edition, no one has yet produced an updated textual edition of Thibaut’s songs. Perhaps more surprising, no one has edited Thibaut’s melodic corpus until now.4 Editors of trouvère lyric have recently made strides in bridging what was once a yawning chasm between the concerns of philologists and musicologists, yet equal attention paid to variance in both text and melody remains elusive. The present study lays out theoretical and practical considerations to redress that concern in editing trouvère song in general and Thibaut’s lyric in particular. After a brief history of editing trouvère music, we examine various sources of Thibaut’s melodies to confront the question of melodic variance. If recognizing the unstable foundation of Mediaeval textuality proves essential for understanding, say, Chrétien de Troyes or Froissart, confronting variance in trouvère melody, or so we contend, is equally crucial for appreciating the trouvère art. Such a confrontation must first address the largest collection of melodies that derive from chansonniers and that preserves melodies that vary only in minor ways among themselves. However, minor variance can pose major problems. Moving out from that central question, we look at two sources that offer entirely different melodies that sometimes utilize contemporary melodic structures and sometimes adopt seemingly older, even anachronistic conceptions of monody. Two other chanter sources preserve melodies that try to conform to new musical conceptions based on polyphonic forms. Finally, we explore the liminal cases of melodic variance — contrafacture 4 With Marie-Geneviève Grossel, the authors are completing an edition of Thibaut’s texts and melodies to appear with Champion publishers in Paris. Although Hans Tischler includes Thibaut’s songs in his 1997 compendium of trouvère lyrics with melodies, the authors feel that his editorial enterprise was too broad to consider it equal to a bona fide edition of the king’s œuvre, for hints to Thibaut’s unique take on the trouvère art are utterly undetectable in Tischler’s massive opus. See below for further comments on Tischler’s editorial approach. 14 VARIANTS 12/13 (2016) and palimpsests — and examine the boundaries of the editorial enterprise. Current state of trouvère editing Early twentieth-century editions, steeped in Lachmannian textual ethics, not only obscured the inherent vagaries of manuscript transmission but also generally stripped the poetic text of its melody, altering its identity as an artifact rooted in performance. A notable exception to this practice was Joseph Bédier’s 1912 edition of the trouvère Colin Muset, which offered eight melodies but relegated them to the back of the volume. Regrettably, Bédier’s subsequent edition of Colin Muset (1938) contained no music, a norm which prevailed for the next four decades.5 Poetry being more accessible to musicologists than Gregorian notation to philologists, a scholar such as Friedrich Gennrich (1951, 1963), in his extensive publica- tions on Mediaeval lyric, integrated music and poetry in ways that textual scholars did not feel qualified to do. But these were performance editions whose scholarly apparatus focused on the music, and they did not offer critical discussion of the texts.6 In the late 1970s philologists and musicologists, who had hith- erto worked in isolation, each asking their own, discipline-specific questions of the manuscripts, began to collaborate. Samuel N. Rosenberg and Hans Tischler’s Chanter m’estuet (1981) proved to be a milestone in trouvère scholarship, closely followed by The Lyrics and Melodies of Gace Brulé (1985), in which Rosenberg collaborated with Samuel Danon (co-translator) and Hendrik van der Werf, and a re-edition of Chanter m’estuet in 1995. The latter two publica- tions boast modern translations in either French (Chanter m’estuet) or English (Gace Brulé), which is also the case for Rosenberg’s next collaborative project, Songs of the Troubadours and Trouvères (1997), with musicologists Margaret Switten and Gérard Le Vot. 5 J.-B. Beck, the musicologist responsible for the melodic transcriptions in 1912, was living in the United States while the other obvious candidate, Pierre Aubry, had died in a fencing accident (Haines 1997), hence the dearth of skilled collaborators on the musical side of things. 6 Indeed, this situation continues to characterize even more recent compendia by musicologists working solo (Van der Werf 1977-79, 1984; Tischler 1997).

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